


13742 - Perspective of a bubble

by faceofstone



Category: Obduction
Genre: Canon - Aliens, Diary/Journal, Gen, Grumpy POV, Nonverbal Communication, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life, Worldbuilding, fake swearing, friends hanging out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 17:59:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8677369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: He was, as they all were, aware of the ambassadors. He did not expect them to breach the sanctity of their little stretch of Earth and bring such alien thoughts inside.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Frankweiler (semperaugustus)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperaugustus/gifts).



I find myself indulging a moral compulsion in defining, at the very introduction of this page, the moral stature of Caroline Farley and the services she has rendered to our community, which, in its forced segregation, can only benefit from any measure of warmth, rigor, and hope. Her well-practised pragmatism does not hail from the mind of a scientist or engineer as we know it - as I know it, holed up in my lab, and it has been brought to my attention that since Ocampo’s death my image has more or less ascended to Hunrath's benchmark in that regard. Yet it springs from the same curiosity. I remember her sitting with her easel and paintbrushes at the edge of this sphere of transplanted Arizona we live in, cataloguing the weather of the vast violet expanses outside. Like there was something of interest out there, like it was part of our lives. I still wonder whether she simply happened to have an overabundance of purple on her hands, but there was method to her brush strokes, and each transparent coat of paint depicted one more terse sunset layered on Soria’s cliffs. Above, a sky cluttered by celestial bodies of fearsome sizes, hovering in the clean cold light of this sun, teasing us with the labyrinthine mosaic of their land masses dotted by blues and greens: life continues beyond our bubble. And yet another, a distant twin of the closest giant, farther away, never switching places for as long as humanity has been here, hides beyond the haze until all that's left is the impression of an illusion, a planet - or the reflection of a planet - stuck beyond our grasp.

 

This is not Earth. Uprooted, filtered through this hellish light, our circle of red rock is not Earth either, not anymore, but we look after it so it can sustain us until the day we'll find the solution to the heckled puzzle that underlies it all and go home.

 

Yet Farley cares for the horizon outside. Her works distill some measure of beauty in it so the rest of us know where to look.

 

As a counterpoint to this schmoop: Farley possesses an intellect of the kind that can find a deck of cards unlike the ones you’d use for poker or quadrille, 70 pieces of paper adorned only by full illustrations of fantastic cities and beasts with scarce regard for the laws of evolution and physics, and make up a set of rules to employ them in a game of skill. (As tempted as I am to say “of chance”, the fact that I have been made to concede every round so far, surrendering my capital to loathsome invading forces, is not reason enough to hold a grudge.)

 

In steadying myself for the recollection of the past weeks, I will commit to paper that I am, iñ fact, aware of the intrinsic hypocrisy of my fears. It would take a blind cow not to notice the Mofang-crafted brace that is allowing me to type these words with little fatigue to my lazy arm. The gaze would linger from there to the unusual patch jobs that embellish Ocampo's old arc welder and eventually to the red cutter which Ximena joyfully christened “the lightsaber”, presumably due to the bright laser blade it emits. “C.W., you are an old fool”, you would say, or, in my customary isolation, I would do the honors myself. “That's Mofang as far as the eye can see.”

The difference is: I can look Rookoh in the eye and ask him what they call a Carnot cycle and how they express it. These exchanges are, at worst, a lesser evil I am willing to pay for a ticket home.

 

So, Farley. It can't have been more than a month ago, at the end of a day of detestable thick rain filling Soria's skies outside. We sat by the rails on our folding chairs, resting our bones and enjoying a drink as our residual perception of the downpour kept filling the darkened horizon. Farley's company, which spans about an hour a day, to ferry us both past sunset and onto supper time, has been a welcome ritual ever since her brother's mayoral duties and untimely death left her alone in that modern house of hers, which, in her words not mine, is “filled with ghosts”. She, I assume, gets “brownie points” for befriending the ogre; I ain't complaining, because I get a friend.

In those days, to the best of my recollection, the topics that kept our brain gears spinning were as follows:

  * Schroedinger's cat, its origins, its position within a wider context of “early 20th century physicists who needed a better hobby” (Farley says it's my 19th century envy speaking. It does not make that diagram any less true - nor less populated), its applicability to our situation. If an observer from the outside world, our world, could peek inside our bubbled stasis, what would they see? It feels like we are being preserved, dead and alive at once, until a lid is opened.

  * Celery. Not as daunting as explaining colors to a blind man; still tricky.

  * Geometrical properties of the sphere;

  * Practical properties of the sphere;

  * Philosophical (for our limited and specific brands of philosophy) properties of the sphere.

  * A stretch of desert two miles south of Fort Craig. To her, a tale, a good-night story: her grandmother had, in her youth, loved that receptacle of scarce sun-bleached grass like no other place on Earth. Here, her words entrusted to a young Caroline every rock, the sudden slope of the mesa, the tracks of a wary roadrunner, night after night until she could walk in it in her thoughts, the only real place in a faded planet she barely knew. I spilled enemy blood there. Our memories intersect across a century.

  * To get lost in a desert that is not this one.

  * Ethics of paper recycling. The old Hunrath conundrum: given the very finite status of both storage space and raw materials, which documents are worth keeping, and who has a say in it?




 

The question of course applies to the present document as well, with an easy answer: I will throw these pages into the pulp bin before the month is over. What is important is the act of laying down these facts in an orderly fashion.

 

“Throw it all together, mix it up, find new connections”, was her newfound policy for any and all documents, from mayor-signed minutes to love letters.

“You sound like a Villein”, I told her, and she smiled a little smile.

 

That, I believe, was the turning point, the moment when her arguments began to breach and abandon the circularity, the symmetry of reason that, by luck of the draw, has become characteristic of the people of Hunrath. Her talks turned toward geology, bending the known facts about the layering of rocks toward a less verifiable discourse concerning the infrastructure of memories. Her conclusion, which was, once again, one step removed from both premise and development: our Earth cell, torn off its planet more than one hundred years ago, contains everything our homeland was, is and ever will be. Therefore, nostalgia is moot.

What part of these pebbles is my daughter, I asked.

 

At a later date, when the brunt of that exchange had worn off, I tried to humor her; in hindsight, it is hard to gauge how harsher my words sounded compared to my intentions - or even how harsh my intentions were to begin with. “What are you sitting here for, plucking your chickens like this,” I believe I said. “Go the whole hog and run for mayor with this campaign, see how the whole town likes it!”

Shoot, she might. And the day Caroline Farley’s name gets listed on a plaque under our good man Benjamin is the day I learn to keep my bull-spewing mouth shut. But for the time being, all the return I got for my outburst was that she clammed up.

For the usual round of pale self-justifications: 1) part of me was still sore for the salt she'd rubbed in an old wound, one that, as any living being with the common sense of a potted plant could infer, is common to most of the people who were spirited away here, unless perhaps they were abducted as toddlers, which, case in point. 2) I was, I realize, growing tired of being used as a testing ground for these wild thoughts of hers, which I did not otherwise see her share with our contained and naturally gossip-prone community. I could not fathom where this newfound “give in to the current; all is one (hallelujah)” attitude was coming from and there was an aftertaste of bashfulness bordering on guilt in the way she expressed it that I did not care for. She didn't trust me with the full story. My dear, if I've listened to all this pig swill without batting an eyelash, I won't go off at the mention of a source. Except I did go off, of course, before it even came to that, proving her right for the wrong reasons. _Science_.

 

I found answers in the dead eye of a bug. The date was, unmistakably, 13723 AH, Fred's Day of Reckoning, one of the last pages of that small leather-bound journal. Had the manuscript possessed the nearest scraps of decency, it would have been titled “Fred's prophecies”, if not “Fred's stream of consciousness whenever he had one too many”, after my own heart. Instead, it is just “Fred”, and one would figure that among all eighty-two of us, someone would remember who the fellow even was, but Hunrath has no recollection of the man if not for that notebook and its cramped pages covered in red ink. Hence: 11736, Fred's Bells of Enlightenment. 11738, Fred's Long Silence. 12003, Fred's Paling of the Evergreen Chestnuts. Naturally, after the fifth or so portent foretold by our diminutive Nostradamus failed to manifest, most people stopped believing. Naturally, this did not deter anyone from gawking outside, just in case.

On the morning of 13273, then, which remained crisp and cold while the shadows were still long, I leaned on my cane and suffered through a stroll downtown. The misanthrope is allowed but a few pleasures in life, and one of them is, unfailingly, to watch one's fellow rabble make blasted fools of themselves. Worth the trip.

Fred's commentary to the present date was laconic, much unlike his usual vivid descriptions of the unseen. It lacked “directions coalescing from the atoms of the air” as well as his, shall we say, more quotable turns of phrase such as “tend to the mirror of a mouth”: his foretold day of reckoning contained just the two words, “a reckoning.” And so it happened that the people of Hunrath seeked that reckoning, scouring the streets, on the abacus, in the distance of the dim planet, pretending not to look.

How the alien came to know about Fred, I cannot say - at least not with certainty, beyond the present compendium of my informed suspicions. Despite the fixed swap we installed between Hunrath and their native Kaptar, it is rare to see the Arai bugs snoop around our turf, yet one of them came here today, and found its end. The stiff had fallen atop two crates, translucent wings still bursting with light while death had already unnaturally folded its six legs against the body like the ‘roaches of yore. I'd come to town for a spectacle; the corpse certainly qualified as one. I sat down on the crates, tapping my cane against the wooden planks for no other reason than to create a reassuring, homely sound against the double threat of mortality and of the unknown. My reflection, C.W. times a hundred and more, stared back from the beast's composite eyes, refracted and eerily tinged by the yellow slit that glowed at their center. And by Jove, the sight must have triggered a lightning-quick flaring of synapses, rational thought racing ahead of the rational mind, because it all came together like the final _clack_ of a toy kaleidoscope’s pieces abandoning their rigid triangular geometries to create a single, meaningful image. _Logic_ , beyond the unnerving feeling of communion with the creature and, worse still, the unfounded yet deep-set fear of having been led to that place and time.

 

Karffing Fred.

 

Regardless: a human reflected by an alien's eye is as much a perversion of the real deal as Farley's ramblings came to diverge from her orderly views. Yet that sorta nonsense is an ill fit for both the Mofangs’ strict individuality, exemplified by Tukoorsot’s paradigm, and what little we know of the Villeins’ strains of unfrayed memories, stretching back through light years like a physical weave crossing the void between stars.

For an hour I rested my leg along the crate, unease growing sharper like a late morning shadow. There might as well have been a crack in the sky, breaching our padded bubble to reveal an unholy brightness outside, pushing a feeling of displacement, of the wrong grass and pebbles substituting our old, identical grass and pebbles. That is to say, yes, I felt betrayed, as a confidant and as a friend. I walked a defeated man's walk to our sole passage to Kaptar, witnessed only by the twin planets, which bore, unperturbed, my steady stream of curses. The swapping seed lay hidden among the rocks, atop Hunrath’s craggy slopes, high up enough to cut my breath off, far enough from help for vertigo. I fell once, as my leg gave in after a sharp step, and lay with my cheek against the ground wondering when, and by whom, my body would be found.

There exist, I was told, about two dozens German words for “stubbornness”, one of which carries, alone, like a secret, a positive if markedly desperate connotation. In those hours, I kept thinking about what it must sound like, this solitary word, and the kind of mitteleuropean expeditions it used to describe. As those thoughts turn to typewritten pages, I am inclined to believe that Belvie made it all up, as people are wont to do with German now that it is dead to us: “indomitability” is, after all, a perfectly serviceable English noun. But what do I know. Maybe Earth still holds a word that expresses in full what I felt that day.

 

Kaptar’s soggy winds put off the remaining fires of the impetus that had driven me there. The journey through its cliffs and mercilessly steep stairways was miserable and I have no desire to linger upon it. Suffice to say, the bugs watched me and - I presume - guided me until the end of the road, the blinding violet abyss that hosts their queens.

The place is no secret: Lõrinc Tóth famously wandered for days, transfixed by the corpses of the airborne whale-like creatures, before he came to this cave and understood that this world was Kaptar, “the hive”, home to the Arai, “the swarm” in his mother tongue. The humanoid civilisation who hunted those sky-whales to extinction broke a wall of this inner sanctum and saw an abundance of bait. The bugs, like overgrown bees, did what bugs do, tending to their queens and larvae with mathematical precision, and paying no heed to my presence.

I came there to be proven wrong: to be able to tell myself, like Tóth and others before me, that for a hive, this sort of activity is altogether unsurprising - and it was, all it reminded me of was honeycombs in a field filled with milkweed and bluebells, and the pungent scent of mint. I needed to see with my own eyes that for all the mysteries and dangers of Soria and Maray, nothing of relevance was going on in Kaptar, nothing that could have beguiled my friend. That was all.

 

In the past decades, Jazmin came to this place and tried the spoken word; Anatoly traced pictographs, the linguist Agam listened for months and came up with nothing, Sun studied the pattern of their flights, Fuhset tried to look like one of them, Gorahksar hummed along with them, Irene and Durahktor were so good-day happy to share math between the two of them that they looked genuinely distressed when a bunch of insects didn't share the sentiment. As I reminded myself of the long list of frustrated entomology enthusiasts, for all my stone-cold certainty that morning, I felt funny. I allowed myself to be relieved: if it was all her doing, considering the pyres of human stupidity burning bright from horizon to distant horizon, the matchstick of Farley's recent weirdness could, after all, prove to be tolerable. If only I could be sure it was her doing, it would be her prerogative to spout nonsense, like we all do. As I rested on that organic-like corrugated stone, lit by scores of luminous larvae shells flashing in synchronous waves, I wished I could be sitting by her side instead, lazily talking about the day.

I take the liberty to note this rather private thought because that is the precise moment when a foreign presence revealed itself in the farthest reaches of my consciousness, like a smoky tendril, and it may be a coincidental turn of events but I rather suspect it may not.

 

In that recess of the brain, resisting every attempt to push it to the fore, I realized that I could see her, not as I remembered or imagined, but as she was on that day, in that moment, hat resting on her back as she collected water from the stream.

 

They (it? Is a swarm more than the sum of its parts?) communicate thus: through sensorial condivision, raw fundamental feelings, the delta between an image and the next, numberless vectors. This did not take long to figure out, although by its very wordless nature, the present summary can only convey a rough approximation of it. But I did not, in my limited time with them, manage to cultivate a shared grammar: all they seemed to react to were memories of Caroline Farley, which they magnified and multiplied in a seemingly childish excitement. Accepting that they appeared to mean no ill to me nor her, I let go of a fraction of the tension that kept me alert and stiff, and that soft thought-space was filled with more visions. I saw with great clarity a carved stone monument the likes of which abound on Kaptar; then, as if they were its echoes, clear water reflecting a radiant white dome nested deep within the jungle and the familiar interference of a hologram when seen up close. The same point, I understood, across the four bubbles. The view of Kaptar expanded, as seen by thousands of Arai drones past and present coalescing into a single buzzing picture, while the other worlds remained less sharp, landscapes painted with a relative paucity of brush strokes, but still vibrant, still resonating with one another, with me, with the undefined, collective entity sharing this with me.

When the image settled, spanning my entire brain and well beyond its borders, I began to be aware of pathways between its points, its places, times, worlds, or rather strings that I could pluck to call for the collective's attention on a singular event, then maybe, like a chord, express a nuanced thought. The realization was short-lived, however, and remained entirely theoretical, as I proved to be unable to bear the full extent of that communion. My head felt like it could split in two, cracked like the larvae’s shells. They seemed to understand and politely retreated. After a minute's rest, I began a slow journey home, carrying heavy thoughts.

 

I will say this: the Arai do not know anything more than we do about our shared captivity in the four bubbles, nothing about the trees’ origin let alone their end. From a certain base discordance, I think the queens were not meant to be together; the seeds forced them to this closeness, like us, and like us they are trying to adapt to the best of their possibility, and even I can empathize with that. I also feel confident in assessing that they do not possess the power to influence the minds they come in contact with - although as Brad would be happy to remind me, there exists plenty of literature on three planets that proves that if that were the case, this is exactly what they would want me to think. But I have to trust something, even if it is little more than just myself. And I need to believe that a matchstick is just a matchstick.

But this vision, this fracture of the self, a sheltered loss of individuality in the cradling arms of a bigger whole - it is alien. The thinking minds of the Arai are separate, yet joined; swarms of drones are for each their eyes and arms, but “each” is not a finite distinction, and some drones were abducted without a hive, carrying with them distant thoughts of distant queens as they joined this new multitude. They are long dead now, but their echo remains.

A human cannot swim in this sea and stay afloat.

 

Farley came clean yesterday, to the great benefit of our relationship. The whole deal: the breakthrough she made with the Arai, the new perspectives it opened, how big and wondrous it all felt, to the point that she could only skirt around the subject until now. With Ben’s certain approval, she will give a talk to the town in a few days, and of course send news to Soria and Maray for the sake of good neighborly relations. But first, she asked me if I would care to join her in meditation with the “polyarchs”, as she calls them - taking it easy through the stairs, maybe lobbying to set up a closer swap next seed we get.

I scoffed and went back to my tinkering.

If she is going to lose herself, someone better stand watch.

 


End file.
